BBC NEWS | Health | Tracking dementia patients with GPS.
Interesting application that uses GNSS to provide health benefits.
Archive for the ‘travel technology’ Category
BBC NEWS | Health | Tracking dementia patients with GPS
March 18, 2009Add-on software apps make iPhone a great travel partner – USATODAY.com
March 4, 2009A good overview of the applications available for the i-Phone to help your travel.
By Roger Yu, USA TODAY
Tech-savvy road warriors are enjoying a new era of handheld computing as more sophisticated smartphone software floods the market.
The iPhone, in particular, has amassed more than 900 applications targeting business or leisure travelers. Many applications are free, and others range from 99 cents to $19.99.
Unlike desktop software, iPhone applications are relatively simple tools that don’t require hours to learn. Most rely on the phone’s embedded GPS chip to tailor information to a traveler’s current location, such as spotting nearby Starbucks, Wi-Fi hot spot, police radar, restaurants and taxi companies. Others transform traditional travel tools — foreign language phrase books, city guidebooks, restaurant tip cheat sheets — and render them digitally.
We recently tried several of the most popular iPhone travel applications…….
via Add-on software apps make iPhone a great travel partner – USATODAY.com.
Travel: TripChill Alerts You in Real Time of Delays, Itinerary Changes
February 5, 2009Travel: TripChill Alerts You in Real Time of Delays, Itinerary Changes.
Another interary building applications launches based aorund long distance travel, again a uses has to forward thier email booking details to the application similar to Tripit and WorldMate.
Within the TripChill application you can set up how notifications about delays can be handled even requsting that notifications are pushed to others, such as you pick up from the airport.
You can even give the application your credit card details to book flights and hotels on your behalf.
These applications I feel are the first step in a truly seemless travel interary planner that incoporates urban and local transport, which is the goal of the i-Travel project.
TripIt Launches an API.
January 27, 2009TripIt, the helpful travel site that lets you generate an itinerary by simply forwarding the service your Email confirmations from hotels and airlines, has opened up an API for outside developers. The API will give third party applications access to TripIt’s itinerary sytem, which now accepts data from 350 travel sites. Developers can find all the details for joining the program here.
via TripIt Launches An API. Travel Sites, Please Use It.
I’ve blogged about this application before, the release of the API hopefully means that we may see more integrated solutions, the software already uses the API to interface with other applications, Expensd allows you to track your expenses while Flight track interfaces with TripIt to track your flights, mapping is provided by Where I’ve been, which is a social networking application that looks up your destination while also plotting your journey on a map.
The main focus of this type of application is business and long distance travel, i-Travel has the objective to bring together long distance and urban travel with context awareness, using standard interfaces and developing specifications that allow seamless travel between modal modes. At present applications such as TripIt provide a limited reaction to events on your route and do not incorporate GNNS technology to track your progress along the journey and feed this information back to the travel provider.
It is easier to develop applications that support long distance travel since the information for flights delay, booking and mapping are readily available, the key to seamless travel is to be about to gather all the information from all provides, no matter what the travel mode and feed it into an API such as TripIt provides. This can only be done through industry cooperation, and while the release of this API is a benefit to the long distance travel industry it is still a propriety format designed for TripIt’s own application, and not for all appliactions.
BBC NEWS | Technology | New phone features ‘baffle users’
January 19, 2009The complexity of modern mobile phones is leaving users frustrated and angry, research suggests.
Some 61% of those interviewed in the UK and US said setting up a new handset is as challenging as moving bank accounts.
Compiled by consultants Mformation, the survey found 85% of users reporting they were frustrated by the difficulty of getting a new phone up and working.
Of those questioned, 95% said they would try more new services if the technology was easier to set up.
via BBC NEWS | Technology | New phone features ‘baffle users’.
This is a timely reminder that the majority of users are not technology buffs and that any design of applications on mobile devices has to be intuitive that its as second nature as putting the kettle on!
In my past I’ve been involved in the design of navigation and entertainment systems in the vehicle and it’s amazing to firstly see and read the feedback and complaints that come from customers about the use and features on their in car systems. No matter what the electronic device the human machine interface appears to be the issue that lets down the whole device. I’ve seen people struggle to load a multi disc CD player with one button that says “load” on.
I’ve also been in design meetings where engineers forget that not all people are as involved in the product design as themselves, and I’ve lost count of the amount of times that I’ve had to tell engineers that “really the cancel route function needs to be the first menu option” or that ” We really shouldn’t put more than one function on a button by using a long or short press as people will never understand how it works”.
The next worse thing in HMI design is to let changes be pushed through by the upper management who have no idea of the context of the device, I’ve argued against the program manager of the of the Jaguar S-Type against changing the number of times that the navigation system gives you voice guidance because he programmed a route from work to his house and I quote ” it spoke to him too many times and it took me the route I wouldn’t go”
Well it’s a navigation system if you use it on the routes you know. then one, it doesn’t know the routes you take and if you know where you are turning having someone tell you three times I can agree is annoying ( this is why wives should stay silent while their husband gets lost). But the point is if you know where you are going the navigation is of no use but if you don’t you may want the 3 instructions.
I’ve made no secret of my appreciation of the design of Apple products who seem to spend a good deal of time and money getting the HMI right, but improvements can always be made. The article goes on to say.
“If an application does not work once or twice, they just will not use it or try again…..Some 61% of those questioned said they stopped using an application if they could not get it working straight away”
If any i-Travel application will be developed then the design and use of it has to be very good least we remove a lot of users due to frustration.
Technology show features location based services
January 7, 2009The international technology show which is being held in Las Vagas has a spotlight on location based services. The BBC is reporting that this year attendance numbers are just as strong as previous and that location based services form a key theme for this years event.
Perhaps 2009 will be the year of location based services!
Tripit an iPhone application
November 3, 2008I blogged about the iPhone and travel applications a few posts back, we also mentioned the Mobimate application as well which acts as a travel assistant.
However another application has come to light with the addition of a new iPhone in my household I’ve also stumbled across an application called TripIt.
Similar to mobimate in some respects, this application allows you email your hotel and travel bookings to an address to build your travel itinerary and will then use your location combined with your travel plans to give you location specific advice and tips.
There is also a social networking aspect where several users of the application can share their itineraries and when overlap occurs this highlighted to you through its location based alert service.
Once the application has scanned in your emails and understands your itinerary you will get goggle maps driving directions, local information from Wikipedia, local pictures, current events (from Eventful), and restaurant reviews and recommendations (via OpenTable). And if you are flying, Tripit will even offer you seat advice (courtesy of SeatGuru).
A sample itinerary can be found here
The best thing of all about this apple iPhone travel application is that it is free! Some good ideas for the i-Travel application.
Find out more at Tripits website.
Isochrones
October 23, 2008Are not cold old people….
Sorry bad joke and only one that works for native English speakers.
So turning to Wikipedia to get a definition we can see that the term isochrone referring to contour lines of equal time, for instance, in geological layers, tree rings or wave fronts.
This is an interesting concept that can be applied to displaying travel time from a certain geographical place to another by using contour bands of differing time. From what I understand of the concept the computing process on the fly is very labour intensive and hence any maps produced are produced with a known and controlled data set.
But the display of travel times becomes in my opinion very intuitive, and one can easily display the difference between taking the train or taking the car. The not for profit organisation called mysociety has done several projects where they have produced maps that indicate just this very comparison.
Here the map assumes that we are starting in Cambridge and shows parts of the UK which are easier and quicker to get to by train are coloured red and orange and those that are easier to get to by car are indicated by green and blue, yellow and light orange show where there is no huge difference at all.
A useful map showing drivers that it may be better to take the train after all.
Another use for these maps has been to produce travel times against another metric, for example house prices, maps on the mysociety page show travel times against house prices in London for working at the Department for Transport. The map then has adjustable sliders so that users can input their own constraints.
Hence users can see literally how far their money will go.
“I want to live 30 minutes away from work and I only have £200,000 to spend then I can live in X,Y and Z”
Actually the disappointing news is that £200,000 won’t allow you to live within 30 minutes of the DFT in London!
Have a play yourself its absorbing stuff.
On their website it states that mysociety wish to expand the concept to include travel costs, but its is obvious that carbon could be the second metric or in fact any other travel related item. The mysociety page also describes that the main issue is getting access to the data sets to support the development of the maps.
Therefore I would encourage companies and organisations working in the travel field to consider ways that such an intuitive method to display travel data could help us improve multimodal up take and get involved in the project.
Mysociety do also say that they are looking for ways to offer real time maps on the web but having this power in your hand in an i-Travel device would be an excellent way to display travel choices, bike V car, car V public transport etc, maybe we need to wait for computing power to catch up first, but getting companies like this invoved in European transport research projects seems a must.
The i-Travel and connected traveller project 